San Francisco did not invent these things, though people think it did

By Greg Keraghosian

on February 2, 2019 4:00 AM

Sourdough

San Francisco sourdough dates to 1849, when Boudin Bakery was born. Then again, the ancient Egyptians were leavening bread with sourdough, which predates us by quite a bit.

Pliny the Elder – the Roman author, not the beer – is on record as writing about sourdough in 79 AD: “Generally however they do not heat it up at all, but only use the dough kept over from the day before; manifestly it is natural for sourness to make the dough ferment...”

As for the idea that San Francisco’s sourdough, using L. sanfranciscensis bacteria, can’t be replicated elsewhere because our climate is so unique, that’s highly questionable.

The San Francisco Treat may technically have been born here, but it was conceived in Armenia. Pailadzo Captanian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, taught her family’s rice pilaf recipe to Lois DeDemenico in the 1940s in San Francisco.

Lois and her husband, Tom DeDomenico, who were living in Captanian’s home at the time, would go on to market Rice-A-Roni based on that recipe.

Rice-A-Roni
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Ghirardelli chocolate

Its chocolate is so San Francisco, the city named a square after it. But Domenico Ghirardelli first sold his chocolate in Uruguay and Peru after he left his native Italy. In 1849 he opened a general store in Stockton that included his chocolates, and in 1850 opened his first San Francisco store.

Ghirardelli’s original Stockton and San Francisco stores burned down in 1851, but he quickly recovered with new San Francisco locations, such as the one pictured above in an early-1900s photo.

Ghirardelli chocolate
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Cable cars

In 1873, San Francisco was the first to run a cable-car passenger system that worked in the long term, but it had already been done decades earlier. One book, The London & Blackwall Railway, by John Christopher – credits the Cromford & High Peak Railway in Derbyshire as employing a cable system in 1831. The London and Blackwall Railway (illustrated above) operated a cable system as well, including a hemp rope and manually operated grips for brakes in 1840. But the ropes, Christopher wrote, “would develop twists and tended to snap after about a month or so, causing disruptions to the service and also expensive repairs.”

Also before San Francisco’s cable car, the West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway used a cable system on an elevated line from 1868-70. Again, the system was prone to performance and maintenance problems, and it was abandoned.

San Francisco and Los Angeles disagree so much about which city invented the fortune cookie, they went to court over it. A federal judge at the Court of Historical Review – in, um, San Francisco – listened to both sides in 1983 and ruled that the cookie originated with Makoto Hagiwara, a Japanese immigrant who served the cookie at the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park in the 1890s.

Los Angelenos condemned the ruling and still maintain it was invented by David Jung in 1918.

But there’s more! A researcher later found that the earliest form of the fortune cookie was made in Kyoto, Japan. Yasuko Nakamachi’s evidence includes repeated literary references to fortune-cookie shaped crackers, and an 1878 image of a Japanese baker making them. She also attributed “fortune crackers” being made at small family bakers she found around Kyoto.

Nakamachi and others remain unsure how exactly fortune cookies became a staple of Chinese restaurants.

San Francisco starred in America’s most famous gold rush, and it’s also proof the city has seen massive displacement well before the tech industry.

But America’s first documented gold rush? That belongs to Cabarrus County in North Carolina. The Reed Mine was born after a 12-year-old farmer’s son found a 17-pound gold nugget in Little Meadow Creek in 1799. The mine enabled North Carolina to become America’s biggest gold producer until the Civil War interrupted things. You can still visit the Reed Mine, which is now a state historic site.

While San Francisco has no doubt contributed to the massive popularity and higher prices of avocado toast, it doesn’t appear to have started here. Australia is widely credited with first serving it – the Washington Post reported that the first recorded sighting of avocado toast on a menu might be in a 1993 at Sydney chef Bill Granger’s café.

Avocado toast
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Gay bar

For all that the Castro District, and Polk Street before it, have done to give LGBT drinkers a place to call home, the claim for oldest continuously operated gay bar is made in two other cities: Oakland (White Horse Inn, pictured) and New Orleans (Café Lafitte) – both of which opened in 1933.

San Francisco rightly gets credited for its beautiful and well-preserved Victorian-era homes – specifically, the more elaborate Queen Anne and Eastlake homes that gained popularity in 1870s and 1880s. And the city is definitely among the first to make them.

But the Bay Area was hardly alone in building such homes in the Victorian era (it began, of course, in Britain during the queen’s reign from 1837-1901). Thanks to pattern books offering pre-cut architectural features and newly created railways delivering them quicker than ever, people around the United States were ordering Victorians the way we’d order custom furniture now. Here are examples of Queen Anne Victorians from around the country.

Pictured are Baltimore’s Charles Village Victorians made to look like San Francisco’s Painted Ladies.

This one should be obvious – it’s Irish coffee, right there in the name! – but the myth persists that it was invented in San Francisco. In fact, it was brought here in 1952 after Chronicle columnist Stanton Delaplane encountered the drink at Shannon Airport in Ireland – where it was actually invented.

Delaplane took the idea to the owners of the Buena Vista Café at the end of the Hyde Street cable car line. After so much trial and error that Delaplane reportedly passed out on the cable car tracks, they perfected the same recipe that’s still served there 2,000 times daily.

Irish coffee
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Yoga pants as fashion

San Francisco is arguably the city that established yoga pants as versatile, every-occasion fashion attire. And upscale brands have since jumped on the bandwagon. But the company that made it all happen, Lululemon, was founded in Vancouver when it first sold its pants in 1998. It wasn’t until 2005 that the company trademarked its original fabric in the U.S.

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Roommate culture

Young professionals living in big cities, trying to establish themselves and cramming into small shared spaces because they’re unable to afford their own home, is a new phenomenon … if you were living in the early 1800s. People of all backgrounds were shacking up together in boarding houses as far back as the mid-19th century.

By one estimation, between one third and one half of 19th-century urban residents in America either took in boarders or were boarders themselves.

If we want to go back far enough, hippies are descendants of Bohemianism, a countercultural movement that began in France in the mid-1800s. The Wandervogel in early-1900s Germany grew their hair long, played folk music, lived in communes and romanticized nature.

Even in the 1960s, when they were actually called hippies, they sprouted not just in San Francisco but other coastal cities before quickly spreading elsewhere.

Hippies
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Chinatown

Granted, San Francisco’s Chinatown was the first in the US when it opened in 1848. But it’s a far sight from being the world’s first or oldest Chinatown. That distinction goes to Binondo in Manila, the Philippines – it was founded in the 1590s, and it’s still going strong.

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, opened in 1934, was notoriously difficult and like no other American prison in history. But even The Rock paled in comparison to “the dry guillotine,” Devil’s Island penal colony in French Guiana, which existed from 1852 to the early 1950s.

Unlike the Alcatraz myth, there really were killer sharks that potential escapees had to deal with, and the claustrophobic conditions were likewise deadly: most of Devil’s Island’s 70,000 prisoners didn’t survive.

Drinking in San Francisco was never the same – for good or bad – after Bourbon & Branch opened its doors in 2006, heralding a new era of craft cocktail bars with specialized ingredients in a 1920s-styled space where you needed reservations to get in.

But as the Chronicle pointed out in a retrospective last year, Bourbon & Branch patterned itself after a much-hyped speakeasy in New York called Milk & Honey.

It’s the stuff of many California hipster punchlines, but it wasn’t born here. Raw kale salad has been traced as far back as 2001, by New York chef Mario Batali. But it earned greater popularity in a 2007 New York Times food column featuring the Brooklyn farm-to-table restaurant Franny’s.

The Bay Area’s Blue Bottle and Philz have played important roles in bringing high-quality coffee to the masses. But before they were born in the early 2000s, Intelligentsia in Chicago, Stumptown in Portland, and Counter Culture in Durham, N.C., were the ones getting the movement started.

Lombard Street gets all the tourists, and Vermont Street may be the curviest street in America. But they didn’t come around until the 1920s, and they have a crooked predecessor in the Midwest. Snake Alley in Burlington Iowa, dates to 1894, when it was a thoroughfare for horse carriages. It has one less curve than Lombard (eight to seven) but those curves are on average more crooked.

We could add most tech inventions to this list, many of which Silicon Valley to the south is responsible for. But among the most life-altering tech inventions, the Web, was created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 in Switzerland.

San Francisco sourdough dates to 1849, when Boudin Bakery was born. Then again, the ancient Egyptians were leavening bread with sourdough, which predates us by quite a bit.

Pliny the Elder – the Roman author, not the beer – is on record as writing about sourdough in 79 AD: “Generally however they do not heat it up at all, but only use the dough kept over from the day before; manifestly it is natural for sourness to make the dough ferment...”

As for the idea that San Francisco’s sourdough, using L. sanfranciscensis bacteria, can’t be replicated elsewhere because our climate is so unique, that’s highly questionable.